I'm getting hits on my Firewall Software from AT&T at least every 3 days. My IT buddy says thats no big deal AT&T does that.

How the fuck is that legal?
Can I make them stop?
What can/do they do this for?

They're likely probing you to make certain that you're not running commercial services on a residential account.

Depending on the operating system and software you're running, you can do any number of things. It's even possible to manually rework their packets and send them elsewhere, and for the most part (not completely!!) masking that you had anything to do with the network transaction. That's only if you have a lot of spare time, and are very vindictive.

NASA and most dot mil's aren't fooled by this. Don't redirect to them. You were warned.

As for legality, you may have signed a contract stating that they can do whatever they merry well want to as long as you're connected through their network. But it's probable that they didn't make you sign anything that says you can't block their scans. I'd look that up.

And it's doubtful you can get them to stop. In fact, if you ask, they may well get bitchy, step the scans up on your machine / IP block, and try to be BOFH-wannabes.

Blargh.

thanks,

not really too concerned about it, just pisses me off